Appreciation: Colin Cowdrey

Checking over personal cricketing memorabilia, I came across a handwritten fragment by Neville Cardus, from an article commissioned for the Guardian on Colin Cowdrey (Obituary, December 6). It refers to his first appearance in Australia in 1954.

Cowdrey, Cardus wrote, "is to make his bow before the crowd at the Sydney cricket ground, an enclosure as pregnant with history as Lord's (or Old Trafford), grandly and poignantly haunted by the shades of Victor Trumper, Charles Macartney, MA Noble. This unrazored newcomer had to face not only Australia's most critical watchers, but also, and not incidentally, an attack containing Keith Miller, Benaud, Simpson, Crawford and Davidson - the last- named not yet, but soon to become, one of the most gifted and lovely-to-see quick left-arm bowlers of any period.

"Facing such bowling, versus New South Wales, and facing a dangerous position for his team, the fresh aspirant scored 110 in his first innings and 103 in the second.

"In the third Test match of the rubber of this same tour of the novice's Test-match christening, England's first innings, at the game's outset, was well-nigh wrecked by Keith Miller. Melbourne was the scene; and Miller fiercely overthrew Hutton, Edrich and Compton for next to nothing. He nearly equalled SF Barnes's famous pre-lunch achievement, for at the interval, his figures were 9 overs, 8 maidens, 5 runs and 3 wickets.

"England's final total was a beggarly 191, of which the so-far anonymous tyro scored 102. Seldom has a Test match individual century halved the team's full innings' aggregate. The name of this just-beyond-teen-aged gallant was none other than Colin Cowdrey."

Two generations separated the men, but as Cardus would say, "Judge every man against the context of his times." For people at home, Cowdrey's performances, like those of Hutton, Tyson, Trueman, Bedser, Compton, Wardle and the rest, lit a grim winter. The pity is that he did not live to see the 2000 winter illumined, similarly, by Nasser Hussain's team.